Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing "is a publisher, anthropologist and philanthropist, who founded her charitable trust (the Sigrid Rausing Trust) in 1995. The Trust has five main areas of interest; Human Rights, Women's Rights and Advocacy, Minority Rights, Environmental Justice, and Social and Economic Rights.

"Last year, she and her husband, film and theatre producer Eric Abraham, together with the publisher, Philip Gwyn Jones (formerly the head of Flamingo), founded Portobello Books, a publishing company. Portobello Books already has an impressive list of authors, and will focus on activist non-fiction, fiction, and fiction in translation.

"In December of 2005 Sigrid Rausing also bought Granta magazine and publishing house from New York publisher, Rea Hederman.

"In 1993-4 she spent a year living on a remote collective farm in Estonia doing fieldwork for a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London, followed by a two-year honorary fellowship in the same department. Her book, entitled: History, Memory and Identity in Post Soviet Estonia: the end of a collective farm, was published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, and was preceded by a range of articles in a variety of academic journals.

"In 2004 she was the joint winner of the International Service Human Rights Award, in the Global Human Rights Defender category. In 2005 she won a Beacon Special Award for philanthropy. This year Sigrid Rausing has been awarded the Women's Funding Network, Changing Face of Philanthropy Award. She is on the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and of the publishing company Atlantic UK." 


 * Former Director, International Women's Health Coalition
 * Founding Council Member, European Council on Foreign Relations